TOMS RIVER — After a strenuous year, Vanessa Smith was thankful for a little help before Thanksgiving.

The 27-year-old Toms River mom brought her two children to wait in line Wednesday outside of Lowe’s on Hooper Avenue for a Thanksgiving meal that will feed her family. She received a blue, insulated bag stuffed with turkey, ham, mashed potatoes, corn and pies.

“It’s a big help,” said Smith, who is recovering from cancer.

To compound her struggles, the weeklong power outage following superstorm Sandy destroyed all of her perishable food, she said.

Lowe’s and Boston Market paired up to deliver 22,750 dinners that serve six people each to families in New Jersey and neighboring states affected by the storm, said Tony Buford, executive vice president of operations at Boston Market. In all, the company will give about 136,000 individual Thanksgiving meals to people in the region. It took 35 trucks to deliver all of the Boston Market meals, he said.

“It was an enormous amount of food,” Buford said.

Gov. Chris Christie and first lady Mary Pat Christie helped to hand out hundreds of Thanksgiving meals at the Lowe’s store Wednesday, meeting with families affected by Sandy.

“This is particularly important of course this year with all that we’ve gone through in the last three weeks,” the governor said.

Christie said despite the impact of the storm, there was “minimal loss of life.”

Much of what was lost can be rebuilt, he said.

“If we lost people, they’re gone forever,” said Christie.

“Structures, businesses, we can rebuild and we will.”

Thousands of New Jersey residents have been impacted by Sandy. Many of them remained displaced from their flooded homes or out of work from their coastal jobs.

Others, such as Smith, found the subsequent power outages to be costly.

“We lost power for a week and a half so we pretty much lost everything in our fridge,” said Jessica Bellisario, 30, of Toms River.

“My little brother and sister are from Seaside, and they still aren’t allowed back … so we’re having Thanksgiving for them at our house.”

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Many Lowe’s employees at the Toms River site, like their neighbors throughout the county, went days if not weeks without a hot meal, said Terry Johnson, senior vice president of operations in the Lowe’s northern division. The disaster following Sandy inspired Lowe’s executives to organize one of the largest food giveaways in the company’s history, Lowe’s officials said.

“We have never done a big food event like this before,” said Julie Yenichek, Lowe’s spokeswoman.

“We’ve had a lot of customers and employees that have been affected by Hurricane Sandy,” said Katie Cody, community relations manager at Lowe’s. “We really knew that food was a critical need in this area. So we wanted to do whatever we could to help them have a happy Thanksgiving.”

Christie thanked all the people and corporations who are helping New Jersey residents in the wake of the storm.

“It’s got to be a team effort in the state for us to recover,” said Christie. “We know that it’s is not going to happen overnight.”

“While there’s been great loss ... we have to also remember the extraordinary things to be thankful for,” he said.